Without delay the government initiated programmes and policies ...
... to improve school attendance
... lift achievement in literacy and mathematics
... to ensure educational achievement was the highest priority in schools
... to provide learning support where needed
... to ensure early interventions were in place
While still a work in progress, there have already been verifiable gains, including, but not exclusive to ...
Positive results in English and maths: Phonics checks showed a significant improvement, with the percentage of students achieving at or above the curriculum expectation rising from 36% in Term 1 to 58% in Term 3.
Teacher and parent perceptions: Roughly half of teachers reported improved achievement in English and maths compared to the previous year, and over three-quarters of parents reported their child's progress had improved in English (77%) and maths (75%) since the "one hour a day" policy was implemented.
The reasons for educational underachievement are always complex, and multivariate, and macro data is always hard to shift.
The current data is authentic. These results are a credit to the Minister, and those she engaged to enact necessary systems and, I suspect, attitudinal reform.
Things look promising.
Why then has the response of education unions and the political left been less than lukewarm and, often, feral?
I believe the reason is primarily an ideological one, and that the motivations are political.
While there is never a single cause of anything, motivations are complex, and causality is never singular, I believe there is one overarching idea that has dominated the education sphere in New Zealand for over forty years. This idea had its origins in our universities in the nineteen sixties, and grew incrementally in influence, gaining momentum in the nineteen eighties and nineties, achieving dominance from the early two thousands. It was promoted in our universities, embedded in teacher education institutions, embraced by the Education Review Office, and became, by degree, a primary policy assumption for political parties of both left and right.
It became what education was to be about, no ifs nor buts.
Education was to be firstly (and by a country mile) about equalizing educational outcomes. It wasn't always presented this way, but this was the goal.
It was only secondarily, and a very distant second at that, about academic excellence. It was not about aiming high. It was not about aspirational benchmarking. It was not about putting in the hard graft.
The underlying assumption was that the system was systemically, and even deliberately, devised to advantage some and not others.
In other words, it was rigged.
Simplistic explanations for educational underachievement, including the denial of personal responsibility, intergenerational welfare dependency, and an expanding menu of "pass the buck" excuses held sway.
For years our education system had struck a reasonable balance between effort and reward, there were incentives to do well, and opportunities to select non-academic pathways were there for those who, ultimately, did just as well.
Previous political administrations can claim few trophies in the educational domain. We have seen the outworking of simplistic, self interested, and avoidant explanations for inequality, and underachievement, for many years, and will bear the consequences of this for many years to come.
While the education unions, education academics, and the parties of the political left, can largely bear responsibility for the current state of our education system, it is doubtful they ever will. That would be more than they could bear.
The parties of the right can also bear responsibility for not asking the right questions, and for their absence of due diligence. And I would also add the media to this list ... no better illustrated than in their near silence with regard to this extraordinary turn around.
So, in the meantime, we can expect to hear more and more bogus stories about school lunches, lots of slogans, appeals to sentiment, and half baked academic pronouncements.
Most of all, congratulations to the new Minister for achieving what no education minister in living memory has achieved ... commencing to turn a self-obsessed, although sometimes well-intentioned, bureaucratic monolith. A monolith preoccupied with social engineering, and jerry-mandered, and simplistic, theories on human motivation ... while drunk on the lie that taking everyone down will ultimately lift everyone up.
This is only the start of the Minister's work, the tentacles of mediocrity run deep, but she undoubtedly deserves the top achiever cup at this year's prize giving. And so do those brave souls who have stood with her.
What a tragedy if she does not get the opportunity to bed in more enduring change.
Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.
12 comments:
Simply political ideology has no place in education
Reasons for educational underachievement are not complex. I've taught thousands of students. Some kids aren't that smart. Some kids simply don't study. Some kids have no love of learning. I'd say 1%, probably generous, are smart, study all the time, and love learning. Many problems begin with parents who live on cell phones and never instilled a love of reading or learning.
The fact that the unions wanted to discuss 'free palestine" with the government says everything about them and their agenda. They want dumbed down little hamas children ready to fight the nasty colonist system of democracy and equality . If children continue to be taught the colonist system of thinking for themselves, then they may not cooperate. I have recenty seen posts of indoctrinated nz kids doing kapa haka with demonic intensity. Another recent example was when nz children in a state funded school, performed a protest song and dance when Erica Stanford came to visit. When are people going to wake up and realise , that te tiriti is an absolute cult.
Indeed. Lots more to do as well... sadly.
Erica, you've done well. Whatever, you must ensure any MP to follow in your steps [just in case you become PM!] has the will and insight to continue your work
"One swallow does not a summer make"
MoEs advisors are still deeply ideologically driven ...
NZCERs strategic priority has gone from decolonizing NZ education to "Māori educational aspirations anchor our work" - they still have 50 staff funded by government.
Consulting organisations pushing marxist ideologies should not be engaged by the MoE and should be de-funded - the Minister is deluded if she leaves these organizations intact - they are the cancer in NZ education.
https://www.nzcer.org.nz/about-nzcer
Teacher profesionalisation has meant a demand for greater teacher autonomy in several anglophone systems. Teachers come to resent being instruments whereby the State dictates what they teach and runs external exam assessments to determine whether prescribed performance criteria have been met.
Unfortunately, the combination of this drive with the politicisation of teacher associations/unions has often brought about a tangible decline in standards. Both universities and employers complain about many recruits from the school system being borderline illiterate and incompetent in basic arithmetical operations. The State may be forced to bring back more prescriptive curricula and external exam assessments. The latter has certainly been the case in NZ with high-stakes assessment for the NCEA especially Level 3. When the NCEA began, it was envisaged that external exams were to become museum displays, to be entirely replaced by internally assessed Unit Standards.
In a similar vein, the just-about 'open' nature of curricula, leaving schools and teachers to fill in what is actually to be taught, has seen a policy U-turn now bringing back State prescribed content.
It's a pity that teachers have allowed themselves to be led by the nose by militant activists running their unions. That have only themselves to blame for being treated as less than professionals.
As a matter of interest, these issues do not affect the Western European 'Napoleonic' systems where teachers are officially civil servants and thereby 'agents of the State' and are legally bound to deliver curricula prescribed in detail. The status of teachers, especially at upper secondary level, is high in those societies.
Yes, good stuff on recent education improvements and achievements, but don’t forget, the Minister had to be dragged kicking and screaming to get her beyond sanctification of ‘te Tiriti’. All is not yet entirely repaired. Watch what they do, not what they say.
and the sad thing is not only as we see in education, the Government can do something about this by getting rid of the idealogues from the public service, and choose not to.
INDEED... but ridding the rot takes years !!
Too HARD to dump the "public service"....
Anonymous 7:09. I also have been involved in teaching thousands of children. These children came to our private schoolroom for remedial maths and reading. We live in a high decile area where the parents are very enthusiastic about education , being the likes of professionals and business owners . Considering the nature of their homes and parents these children should not have been failed by the local high decile schools . A proportion of the children had dyslexia but the majority were of normal intelligence and inclinations toward learning . We never blamed the teachers but rather the ideologies of our educational institutions , Child -centered constructivism is the culprit. This insidious ideology has the child in charge of their own learning particularly with respect to learning to read, ( Whole Language ) as dictated by a now thoroughly disproven developmental theory. This theory stated that leaning to read was identical to learning to speak. The Piagetian primary focus on meaning was another destructive theory foisted on children -.Ignore phonics and focus on context for determining the word in a sentence and in maths there was no learning off facts like tables and algorithms , as cognitive science would advise, but just concentrating on understanding, discovery learning and problem- solving.
Mountains of research for a mulltitude of decades have pointed to explicit , systematic and accumulative learning being superior to feral constructivism but our mis-education system would have none of it.
Certainly children have different attitudes to learning and Traditional Education recognized that with teachers insisting on strict discipline and compliance with what their directives. .A work ethic was also instilled into children , which is anathema to constructivism which believes school was to be fun and even entertaining. Common sense would reveal this is sentimental- rubbish thought , out of touch with the reality of children's natures.
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